Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in 2008 to the Atlantic magazine brings forth the argument of how modern technology, like in the past, has affected us into changing the way we think, and go about taking in information. Throughout the article he supports arguments with personal accounts of colleagues as well as past accounts in advancements in technology that shaped modern day. Carr’s article begins with dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in which he relates with the supercomputer HAL as it loses its mind when Bowman disconnects its memory circuits. Carr like many of us today states that when reading he now finds himself distracted, unable to concentrate and make connections with the text. He implies that the reason for it is that the internet has changed how he operates, he feels as if the vast amount of things to do while surfing the net as he goes from thread to thread and consumes different types of media has reshaped his malleable brain into wanting to do the same when reading anything of significance.

They state that because of the convenience of the internet they simply prefer doing so by that form of media, as they do so they become further implemented in the “phenomenon” that the internet is causing as Carr calls it. The clock, like computers today, has changed the way we approach day to day life as we became more dependent on it to tell us what to do and when to do it from the day it was introduced. The internet has become the largest source of information, through it the possibilities of information far surpass what a library could supply, though Carr believes that with it comes the negative aspect of the internet, as it surrounds such information with all the possible content that drags the reader’s trail of